


To say a little is often to tell more

by middlemarch



Category: Far from the Madding Crowd (2015)
Genre: Angst, Conversations, F/M, Letters, Marriage, Post-Canon, Romance, but it's not the worst, this isn't the cheeriest outcome for William Boldwood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-15
Updated: 2019-08-15
Packaged: 2020-09-04 00:42:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20256184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: He said something after several months, when it became apparent she wouldn't stop.





	To say a little is often to tell more

“I wish you wouldn’t,” Gabriel said from the doorway. Bathsheba could hear the bustle in the kitchen, the preparations for the evening meal, Liddy’s laughter; it had been quiet with the door closed and she might have forgotten there was a world outside the sitting room. A world that was not bounded by her inkwell, the white page before her, the pen in her right hand carefully balanced so she would not blot the paper while she thought.

“You wish I wouldn’t what?” she asked. She wasn’t being coy or disingenuous, though perhaps Gabriel might wonder.

“I wish you wouldn’t write to him. Boldwood,” he said, leaving off the polite title he once would have included without any conscious thought.

“You would begrudge him so little? A letter? He is being punished—is it so much for him to be reminded that there are those who can still recall the good in him? That he is not forced to turn only to God for consolation?” Bathsheba said. It was always difficult to write to William Boldwood; it would have been easier to pretend she’d never met him, had never seen him smile at her or heard him sing. 

“I don’t begrudge him a letter. Letters. I wish it wasn’t you who wrote them,” Gabriel said, the light of dusk behind him. His coat needed brushing and she could see the long day in the shadows beneath his eyes.

“You cannot be jealous of a few letters! We’re married, I’m Mrs. Gabriel Oak, and all this is ours, this house and the farm. William has nothing left, because he wanted to protect me,” Bathsheba exclaimed. “Or is it that you don’t trust me? That you think I would send him something your wife should not, something untoward? Because I once sent a Valentine?”  
She felt flushed, her hand trembled. She set down the pen so that she would not spatter ink like a spoor across the page. She’d written little enough.

“I’m not jealous. I pity the man. I don’t think he was made to be a murderer, but he has become one. I trust you to do what you think is right. You’ve always done that,” Gabriel said, the words measured. He’d walked closer, near enough he could reach out his hand to touch her, but he didn’t.

“What then?”

“Every month, you sit down to write to him and it makes you suffer. He has refused your visits, he hardly responds and when he does, his few words have made you suffer all the more. You cry in your sleep over it. It’s a torment, one I don’t want for you. One I cannot believe he would want for you either,” Gabriel explained. “Bathsheba, can you not see how it hurts me to see you in pain? All I want is your happiness, your peace.”

“I don’t think I can have both. If I left off, I should be happier perhaps, to forget, but I couldn’t be at ease. I’d rather have this and know I did right. I cannot bear to think of him entirely abandoned. That he would think all he has become to me is a hand on a gun.”

“Do you think your letters will convince him?”

“Are you asking me what I write to him?”

“No,” Gabriel said but it took him longer than she’d expected to answer.

“But you should like to know,” Bathsheba said.

“I cannot imagine what you could write to him. I cannot but you can, you must do. It’s how you’re made, to see not what others do not, but how others do not. And to be free enough to say it,” Gabriel said contemplatively. “I think he must feel your letters are like falcons, making sport of the sky. They must be like doves cooing in the eaves, the sound of communion though the darkness falls.”

“My goodness,” Bathsheba said, taken aback by the vividness of the images Gabriel conjured, by the deepening of his Wessex accent as he described the world she’d hardly noticed. “They can be nothing like that to him, they don’t amount to much, for all my efforts.”

“They must be everything to him. He loves you.”

“Oh!”

“You know that. You’ve known it for a long time. It’s why you write to him,” Gabriel said.

“And if I agreed, would you be troubled by that?”

“No,” he said simply, as if he were refusing a second cup of tea.

“No?” she repeated.

“No, because you love me,” Gabriel said. “At dawn, when the mourning doves are singing, you’ll be in my arms. In the night, if you weep over this letter or the next one, you’ll turn to me.” Bathsheba caught her breath to hear him say it; it was as natural as the ocean and as devastating as the waves crashing against the chalk cliffs. Gabriel saw and smiled at her. She turned in her chair and reached out to him, taking his hand to stand up. Standing quite close to him, so she could put her hand on his chest to feel his heart beat.

“Well, you’ve won,” she said softly. “I cannot write another word to William now, not when all I can think of is you.”

“Finish it tomorrow then,” he replied.

“I thought you wished I wouldn’t,” she said, straining up so she could graze the corner of his mouth with her own, a kiss that was a promise.

“My wishes are nothing to your plans, Bathsheba.”

“I hope they are not always at cross-purposes,” she said. He pulled her close, a hand at her lower back, kissed her swiftly, intently. She made a small sound, of hunger, of satisfaction, and he kissed her more soundly, though she felt the demand he made upon his self-restraint.

“They are not, are they? My wish, your plan, sometimes they are the same. Sometimes, they cannot be teased apart,” Gabriel said, his lips at her ear. She only nodded slightly, just enough to feel him stir against her, to take her hand in his to lead her from the room. 

She’d return to the letter the next day. She’d have decided what to write, about the nesting of the swallows, the feather she’d found and kept. It was little enough, little and enough.

**Author's Note:**

> Here's a post-canon vignette to look at how William Boldwood still figures in Bathsheba and Gabriel's lives. I admit, I did zero research as to the historical accuracy of 19th century imprisonment and focused on whether this felt true to the characters.
> 
> The title is (of course) from Hardy.


End file.
